I often think back to the night I went vegan. It was a Sunday evening in November of 2013. I was sitting on the bed trying to find something to watch on Netflix, not thinking of much in particular. My husband and I had recently seen friends, all of whom were either vegan or vegetarian (including my husband), and we saw them often. Usually our time was spent playing video or board games, talking and having a laugh. As was custom when we got together, we usually ordered take-out. In the beginning of our friendship (I had met this group through my husband who had known them all for years), I was the only meat-and-dairy eater in the group and at first, I was the asshole kind: I would order a meat dish just to prove some point that now seems lost on me. But as time went on, and as I got to know each of them better, I started ordering vegetarian dishes. I had reached a point where I didn’t want to offend their beliefs, even though I still clung tightly to my own.

Here’s the other thing: I genuinely liked them. They were fun, funny, thoughtful, and smart people who embraced me from day one. And without saying a word about their veganism, they were influencing me. They didn’t know it but the more I hung out with them, and the more I saw all their animal-free products and animal rights books and T-shirts, the more I began to see animals and the people who represented them – vegans – differently (spoiler alert: stereotypes are usually bullshit). Continue reading →

Today is a big day for me as it marks my one-year anniversary of becoming a vegan. What started out as a six-week trial run that only my husband knew about has become a complete one-eighty of how I not only view food and animals, but how I view the world. Quite simply, it has changed my life.

I first wrote about why I became vegan after the six-week period was up and I knew I wasn’t going to go back to eating meat and dairy. As I’ve said before, it was a no-brainer once I began to understand the issues. Today I re-read what I first wrote almost a year ago about my “coming out” and with the exception of one sentence that I no longer feel the same towards (I’ve since updated the post to reflect this), nothing has changed. That is good news and bad news. Good news because it has only strengthened my resolve to share my experience with others but bad news for the millions of animals who continue to toil away in factory farms and slaughterhouses with no choice in the matter. Continue reading →